Candidate Promoters and Detractors

Justin

March 18, 2015

Culture & Engagement, Employment Branding, Recruiting & Hiring

For the six years I lived in the UK, I spend a lot of unwanted time on public transport. Given my compact height, a considerable amount of these rush-hour journeys were spent with my nose at armpit level which taught me the art of holding my breath like a champion free diver.

This was a conflicting challenge considering deep breaths are a great way to calm the nerves and get you into a zen state.

Public transport doesn’t bring out the best in people as Matt Buckland’s above tweet highlighted.

He let someone off the tube, but the man thought he was getting in his way so started pushing.

‘Matt explained “I was getting off too but he pushed past and then looked back and suggested I might like to go f&*% myself“.

But then later that evening Matt was conducting an interview, and who should turn up? The guy who was rude to him on the Tube.

He didn’t get the job.

Regardless of what international population data shows, we live in a small world, especially if you’re in the world of recruitment. Whilst this example shows the impact on candidates being rude towards hiring managers and recruiters, we need to remember that candidates of today can be the promoters or detractors of tomorrow.

Candidate Promoters and Detractors can have an impact on your brand

How you treat your candidates has a huge impact on your employer brand and for companies that are in the public space such as Westpac or Coles, the candidate experience can also impact how they perceive and engage with your brand on a consumer level.

What’s the impact of a candidate investing their time to apply for a role and never hearing back from anyone? Probably not positive. How about when you advertise a role, someone accepts the job only to discover their KPIs are nothing like you advertised? These are factors that can really impact your brand and given that the most powerful form of hiring is internal referrals, you want candidates to be singing from the rooftops about your amazing, transparent hiring process from the moment they submit their first application.

So to attract the strongest candidates and their wider circle of influence into your organisation, all employers and recruiters need to treat the process as a two-way sell as the likely situation is that these stand out applicants will have a few offers on the table. As business owners, we want happy customers and repeat business so let’s treat all candidates like high-value customers every stage of the process.

There is nothing stronger than a personal recommendation and if new candidates are encouraging their friends, neighbours and university contacts to join your organisation, then you’re clearly doing something right.

And just to be safe, with the cost savings you’ve made from being able to hire referrals, maybe all the employees over 6ft can be given some extra deodorant before jumping on the train.